'Testimony' as The Category for Accessing the New Testament Gospels

To kick off this new blog of mine, we will jump into some reading I have been doing with Richard Bauckham; it is a very exciting book for me to read because it gets us back to the sources (the cry of Christian Humanism and what helped foster the Protestant Reformation, ad fontes). In other words, Bauckham's book, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, is developing an account of New Testament criticism that places eyewitness testimony as the category through which we should approach the New Testament and Gospels witness to Jesus Christ. What I appreciate about Bauckham, and his own background (which resonates with my own interests, really), is that he represents a nice colash of biblical/New Testament scholar and Systematic and Dogmatic theologian. Anyway, what I want to share from Bauckham, first, comes from his opening chapter; he is discussing the significance of the category of 'testimony' for New Testament criticism, and how it naturally fits into a theological paradigm for engaging the Christian God revealed in Jesus Christ. He writes:

Testimony offers us, I wish to suggest, both a reputable historiographic category for reading the Gospels as history, and also a theological model for understanding the Gospels as the entirely appropriate means of access to the historical reality of Jesus. Theologically speaking, the category of testimony enables us to read the Gospels as precisely the kind of text we need in order to recognize the disclosure of God in the history of Jesus. Understanding the Gospels as testimony, we can recognize this theological meaning of the history not as an arbitrary imposition on the objective facts, but as the way the witnesses perceived the history, in an inextricable coinherence of observable event and perceptible meaning. Testimony is the category that enables us to read the Gospels in a properly historical way and a properly theological way. It is where history and theology meet. [Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 5-6.]

This is great to consider! As we get further into Bauckham's book, something that stands out about the kind of personal testimony that Bauckham is highlighting is the nature of the testimony; in other words, these were real life people who bore witness to the theological reality they encountered in the person of Jesus Christ. What I like about this reality and emphasis of testimony is that it has the affect of personalizing and humanizing the scriptures, and the Gospels in particular, that is often lost when we usually think of the higher criticism that usually attends New Testament studies. This category of 'testimony' provides a sense of continuity and genealogy to the witness of scripture that interpolates the original witnesses with the present witnesses (us) to the Jesus of Faith and History whom we all have encountered in unique ways. Of course there is a distinction between the kind of witness and testimony that these original eyewitnesses had, and what we have; but the shared reality between the two is the same, that is the living and resurrected Jesus Christ.

Expect to hear more from Bauckham from me.